3. What can literary theory be?

    Though hardly a recent invention, “literary theory” has attained a noteworthy prominence in recent decades. The speculations of Aristotle or Plato had dominated centuries of aesthetic policy. Some “theorizing" was performed by figures engaged more centrally in the production of literature, such as Dante, Sidney, or Coleridge. The “pure theorist" seldom rivalled their renown. Today, in contrast, theory is the centre of power and impetus in literary studies, as far as I can judge. A top-ranking theorist is likely to surpass in rank and salary an author-in-residence. The typical critics of past times, the historians, classifiers, evaluators, and interpreters of literature, are receding into relative obscurity.

    To some degree, the recent upsurge of interest in literary theory among academic institutions reflects a growing awareness of the urgency for justifying literature and its study to society. So far, however, many theoreticians do not make this factor very explicit or emphatic. They may consider the literary profession adequately insulated by its institutional status, as attested by their own eminent standing. Some of them simply vow to give a theoretical rationale for what literary studies has already been doing in its conventional formats. But the immense preoccupation with describing and explaining literary and critical transactions signals a premonition that the literary profession might otherwise be considered an expendable institution of undefined utility. The marginalizing of literature noted in Chs. I and 2 reflects on criticism as well.

    In the past, literature periodically had to be defended against unfairly narrow conceptions of functionality. The result was some such tract as Aristotle's or Sidney's, explaining how literature did (or could) serve desirable functions. Nowadays, only repressive splinter groups like the ludicrously misnamed oxymoron “Moral Majority" vilify literature as useless and dangerous. The disquieting factor is the real majority withdrawing into indifference and refusing to genuinely participate in the arts they may still be willing to patronize. For a time, literary studies felt content to accept the patronage and construe the increasing marginality of their concerns as proof of an elite awareness or a cultural mission in a darkening age. But eventually the possibility had to be raised that the way the professionals were dispensing literature to society may be among the causes of its marginalization. Thus, the latter-day theoretician's “defence of poesie" is just as much a defence of the critic's role-more often as it might be than as it is in daily practice.

    The upswing in “literary theory” is thus plausibly a belated and mediated response to a broad, complex shift in the social functions of literacy -- an indication that a major effort must now be made to comprehend and expound the activities associated with literary texts. Although by no means openly acknowledged by all theoreticians, this goal may help explain their rise to power and their migration into theory from more conventional domains. The sudden concern for "the reader" is in part a homage to the role the critics hope more people will adopt if it can be made to seem more engaging and stimulating.

    Anyone seriously reflecting upon the traditional activities of criticism should realize why its credentials might be questioned. Sticking close to the works themselves, the critic is forced to objectify them from various angles in order to extract from them a frame of reference wherein they can be handled. The critic is constantly involved in producing the effects or criteria pretended to belong to the works; and every campaign to make the results stand alone only generates another form of involvement, more devious perhaps, but never innocent of prior intent.

    The historical critic would seem to have a straightforward job describing works, authors, and schools in chronological order. But the relevance of this seemingly reliable framework has been increasingly questioned. Authors' biographies may be unenlightening. Influences, techniques, and question-answer chains migrate in odd patterns, skipping across epochs or national boundaries and suggesting quite different currents from those of official or political history. History itself readily becomes a text whose stories are gradually recognized to be literary, and hence more naive enactments of the same problematics they were supposed to organize. The reassurance of temporal order and documentary evidence fades before the prospect of having to rewrite history itself in a new mode before we can use it to make sense of literary history.

    The classifying critic is also beset with problems, thanks to the harrowing intransigence of a supremely creative medium. No matter what categories are devised, individual works, including many of the most famous, keep falling out, or in between. This elusiveness, a major part of their appeal and a natural product of their richness of alternative perspectives, is maddening to the classifier, especially to one with a nostalgia for the tidy taxonomics of the sciences. Conventional if not mediocre works seem to provide the best fit, but are also of the least interest. The solutions to this dilemma are uniformly unattractive: basing a class on a single great work, as Aristotle did with Oedipus Tyrannus for tragedy; keeping strict classes but tolerating as many exceptions as regularities; creating complicated mixed classes like "neoromantic sentimental-ironic tragicomedy"; and so on. At best, the classifier can help reconstruct the ambience wherein a given work appeared, without hoping to capture the work's individual quality.

     The evaluating critic is caught in a comparable contradiction. In this pursuit, one derives standards from certain literary works and turns around to pass judgment on other works that do or don't measure up. Faced with a rejoinder that the standards were subjectively derived in the first place, so of course the works don't fit, the critic's only rebuttal is to claim superior taste and discernment, better than not only the public's, but the literary author's, by virtue of having experienced large quantities of works. Yet the merit of a single work may inhere in precisely those non-standard qualities that make it unlike any other. So even if the critic's standards are indeed representative, the failure of a single work to meet them is a problematic, maybe even inverted, measure of its value.

    The interpreting critic is even worse off to the extent that reducing the alternative meanings of the literary work to just one runs counter to the major function of literature. The chosen one is often advanced with an exclusive, rather than inclusive, claim to acceptance -- as correct, central, authorized, and so on. Here, the interpreter objectifies not only the work, but the interpretation as well, and makes the process into a product lacking the prestige and permanence that abet the objectification of the original work. The critic's distasteful reward is to be left defending embattled ground which a genuine respect for the work should prefer to see displaced.

    Such problems might suggest why, when criticism undergoes theoretical scrutiny, the customary proceedings of historicizing, classifying, evaluating, and interpreting become profoundly unsettled. Theorists must now consider whether such activities should be redefined and continued on a more rational basis, if such can be found; or whether they should be abandoned as illusory or inappropriate. Usually, a compromise position is adopted. Even theorists who contemplate abandonment -- as Frye does with evaluating and Culler and Iser do with interpreting -- still perform those activities to some degree. And whatever new tasks are proposed are partly transformations of these old ones, as in the masterfully agile reformulation of classifying in Frye or of historicizing in Jameson.

    Redefining their own role forces critics to devote concentrated attention to the act of reading and responding. They become fairly immune to the old objectifying fictions of the meaning just being there “in" the text, or of the text itself telling us what it means (Ch. 1). Scarcely anyone of note (besides Hirsch) still professes a principled belief in a single “correct" meaning for a given text. However, the facile accusation that reader-based criticism tolerates any old response is inappropriate in every case. Though all our critics acknowledge the "openness" of the literary text, each of them advances a distinctive proposal about whether, how, and how far it can or should be "closed" during response.

    The traditional emphasis on the literary author is correspondingly unpopular. Perhaps a reaction has set in against the longstanding bias toward authors. Perhaps current critics suspect their enterprise will have to get its foremost support from readers, not from authors, who form a marginal group on the contemporary scene. In any event, modern theorists, unlike the classicists, do not issue guidelines to authors. Nor is much weight placed on the role and intention of the author as theoretical entities, except insofar as they relate to readers” responses. At most, the author's intention is permitted to return in transmogrified forms: as a ponderous scholarly apparatus for Hirsch; an inner personality conflict for Paris; an infantile bodily fantasy for Holland; a patriarchal sexual politics for Millett; a despondent, defiant egotism for Bloom; a mytho-poetical signature for Fiedler; and so on. Even these constructs are chiefly reasoned backward from reading, and their historical anchoring is usually quite sketchy compared to that of older biographical criticism.

   The claim of the critic to attain and present a model response may be indispensable to all criticism, and persists even now in literary theory. The new theoretical emphasis implies a far stronger claim than older traditions did: that the critic's acts are generally valid not just for a given work, but for all reading of literature. However, such claims are expressed in drastically varying forms. Iser and early Holland purport to be describing what the general reader does anyway. Fiedler started out to plead the cause of an elite reader and later decided to favour the general one. Hirsch, Bleich, Millett, Jauss, and Jameson each advocate a specialized way of reading that would demand a major initiative before it can be established in common practice. De Man and Hartman assert their way of reading to be enforced by the problematics of language itself. Bloom portrays his as a struggle for personal mastery over a source. And so forth.

    The utopian quality of the literary experience makes it unavoidable that any interesting model of reading and response is also an imperative, the more so when general validity is implied. Critics who really considered their response the same as every other reader's would have scant motivation to communicate it. The theoretical exposition is needed precisely because such a response may well not occur. In fact, the main impetus of literary theory arises from this possibility. The theorist can't legitimately offer a model of how all people read a work, but only of how some people might read it. We have a right to ask how plausible, feasible, and worthwhile the model may be. The famous “reader" we keep hearing about seems to hover in a permanent identity crisis. To say the least, the skill and training of these critics makes their reading atypically intense, thorough, and elaborate. They assign numerous functions to the elements they find. They upgrade seemingly insignificant elements and downgrade seemingly incompatible or incomprehensible ones. They reread the text, bringing altered perspectives to bear. And, most importantly, they try to formulate their results in exemplary ways we may reconstruct and utilize. The fact that the critical text is always a response to a response, and the theoretical text a response to a set of such second-order responses, must not be underestimated, because this setup puts the literary text at several removes (each of them quite problematic) from the theory.

    Our theorists are usually confident that their way of reading is the one demanded by the very essence of literature. Their characteristic move is to attune their definition of literature in precisely this way. For most, however, that way of reading is more immediately demanded by a special project: more rigorous scholarship for Wellek and Hirsch, continuity of myth and archetype for Frye and Fiedler, a return to the sacred for Hartman and Bloom, insights into one's personality for Holland, Bleich, and Paris, a displacement of Western metaphysics for de Man, revolutionary awareness for Jameson and Millett, and so on. Thus, their advocacies must always be appreciated in light of their projects.

    Not too surprisingly, the combative urge to defend values or interpretations has been transferred to defending theoretical models and projects. In their zeal to move their several theories into prominence, if not predominance, many literary theorists treat each other more as antagonists than collaborators. The benefits of such egotism and partisanship are surely outweighed by the damaging spectacle that the profession offers to public view. The total impression is paradoxical: a leading group of exquisitely skilled readers don't seem to understand reading well enough to agree on its barest essentials.

    The alternative to such personal partisanship is to pursue the prospect that each one theory may capture some relevant aspect of literary experience and yet falsify the latter at the moment when it denies all the others. My work here is intended to develop that prospect by scrutinising “critical discourses” in unusual detail. I have always believed we should learn from as many people as possible, however ardently they may collide with each other. Admittedly, the projects of many scholars may not be well designed for such integration. And the complexity of the literary experience is inherited by critical discourse. But the project is all the more urgent for being so intractable.

     As long as it is granted space to operate, criticism will be a self-perpetuating enterprise. Each assault it makes on literary problems leaves fresh problems in its wake. The closure of a work, genre, style, and so on is followed by an opening at some other point of the system. A genuinely useful critique of literature leaves it looking not simple, but more challenging than before. In such a context, critical theory needs no extraneous clash of egos and careers to deflect its progress and postpone its consolidation. The striking plurality of theories we now see is not to be resolved by gladiatorial elimination of participants. The main loser would be literature itself, locked into the eventually triumphant theory and much reduced in the dynamics whereby it had called forth the plurality in the first place. Instead, we should seek to integrate competing theories in a framework that respects their individual valences without hypostasising them beyond the limits of their insights.

     This book retraces my own attempt to navigate a set of literary theories proposed by prominent critics in terms of their discourse; and to survey what each theory, in my view, performs or projects. To promote fidelity, I have tried to distill out the main points in the actual words of each critic, suitably rearranged and condensed, even at the risk of choppy quotation. I raise some problems that their theories seem to imply but not solve: divergences between theory and application, or between one part of the model and another; disturbing implications of particular arguments; disproportionate emphases at the expense of other factors; conflicts with the results of empirical research on text processing; and so on. Yet like the great literary work, the major critical work is not vitiated but vitalized by its problems. The critical theorist's best achievement is to return us to literature with a new sense, paradoxically reassuring, that literariness will never be totally explained.